News archive

Last Saturday, Elie Wiesel passed away at the age of 87. The Holocaust survivor and writer was regarded as a significant voice of remembrance for the victims of the Shoah. Wiesel had survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps and, to the end of his days, was a committed activist in confronting racism and...

Lorraine Willson travelled from Australia to Poland and Germany with her husband David with a view to retrace the path of her parents’ lives. While visiting the International Tracing Service (ITS) she received documentation about the time her parents spent as Displaced Persons (DPs) and the steps they took as DPs in...

New ways to access the documents in the ITS archive, an increase in the number of inquiries and interesting projects showing the different avenues of research: The Annual Report 2015 provides a look at the work of the ITS and is now available online at the ITS website.

The interactive web-documentary “Im Märkischen Sand” (In the sand of the Mark) commemorates the April 1945 massacre of 127 Italian forced laborers in Treuenbrietzen . As part of a photo series within the project, documentation from the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS) illustrates the NS bureaucracy of...

75 years ago today, on 22 June 1941, the German Reich began its assault on the Soviet Union. Right from the start the military campaign was planned to be a ‟race-biological” war of annihilation. The goal was the economic exploitation of the population and the region, the conquest of ‟living space”, and the systematic...

Some 65 million individuals worldwide are refugees, the highest number ever recorded by the UN Refugees Agency. Most of these refugees are trying to escape war and violence – more than 50 percent of them are children. Only a few of those seeking refuge come to Europe: in 2015 approx. 1.3 million people applied for...

Societal and personal repercussions of the Shoah and of Nazi forced labor were the focus of the workshop “Life in the Aftermath –Displaced Persons, Displaced Children and Child Survivors on the move. New approaches in education and research”, a joint event organized by the International Tracing Service (ITS) and the...

Esther Bejarano survived Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and a death march. In Auschwitz she played accordion in the all-girl orchestra. For a number of years now the 91-year-old musician and political artist has been performing gigs with her son and the hip-hop band “Microphone Mafia“. Her message: stand up against hate and...

With a three-volume commemorative book and the virtual “Room of Names“ the Mauthausen Memorial is setting a monument to all those known by name who died in the Concentration Camp Mauthausen and its sub-camps. Transport lists from the ITS archive served as one of the information sources for this book.

In 2016, the Canadian Daniel Krywiak contacted the Neuengamme concentration camp in the hope of finding out more about his father’s fate. He never would have expected the answer he received. The staff informed him that his father’s pocket watch was in the archive of the International Tracing Service (ITS). He then...